SteelSeries Apex 9 Mini Gaming Keyboard Review

The Best SteelSeries Gaming Keyboard for Most Users

Alex Rowe
6 min readMar 8, 2023

--

SteelSeries Apex 9 Mini gaming keyboard sitting on a keyboard tray.
Photo taken by the author.

If you’re looking for the perfect price/performance sweet spot in the SteelSeries keyboard lineup, the Apex 9 Mini is it. This is my favorite keyboard of theirs I’ve used, and I think it’ll be the most pleasing to the widest variety of gamers and keyboard enthusiasts. It isn’t quite as “full featured” as the recent Apex Pro refresh models, but amazingly it offers a few bonus perks that those more expensive models can’t match.

That’s right, I think it’s better than the SteelSeries Apex Pro Mini, which I may have called the best new gaming keyboard of the year just six short months ago. If I had tried this one first, it would have won instead. Let me tell you why in this combination review article/mea culpa statement.

I wasn’t paid or asked by SteelSeries to write this, and I don’t use affiliate links in my stories.

The SteelSeries Apex 9 comes in two different sizes: a TKL model for $139, and a Mini 60 percent model for $129 (official site here). I tested the latter, which I managed to snag at Best Buy for a paltry $101 on sale. The bang-for-the-buck ratio of the Apex 9 puts these keyboards in an excellent competitive place against the rest of the gaming peripheral market, and also against SteelSeries’…

--

--

Alex Rowe

I write about gaming, tech, music, and their industries. Creators and fans are so much more than numbers on a graph.